No Pain in Pop Halloween Party at Goldsmiths

Sometimes the scariest thing is mortality itself.

Going to a place like Goldsmith's Student Union when you're no longer a student yourself is a pretty fucking chastening experience. It's not just that, lacking proper jobs, these surly kids have time to create the best Halloween costumes in the world; it's that they're all so unbearably young, beautiful and glutted on pleasure. 'I don't even want to think about how often they all probably have sex,' I said to my friend as we walked in. 'They probably do have sex quite often,' he replied. 'But on the other hand it doesn't last very long when you're that age. So if you add up the total duration, we might still be better off.' Well, yes, as a weary 23-year-old graduate, I may only have sex about once a year, but of course it does take four or five days for my decrepit central nervous system to accomplish the task. Take that, Youth.

I was struck, too, by how sharp the student DJs were. When I was at university, if you had one Justice remix downloaded off an MP3 blog, you were basically Larry Levan. But the No Pain in Pop guys were playing dubstep and neo-Italo and everything in between, presumably in the expectation that their audience would not only recognise but even enjoy all this Dazed-approved esoterica. That’s art school, I suppose. You could say the same of the selection of bands, which included El Guincho, The XX, and The Big Pink, but not even a single The Darkness tribute act.

Unfortunately, all I caught was a bit of openers A Grave With No Name, who suffered from lacking a drummer, and a bit of The Big Pink, who sounded great. Still, all in all, Goldsmith’s Student Union is an excellent night out, if you don’t mind feeling like a bitter, repellent oldster. That's assuming, admittedly, that you’re not a student yourself - but if you are, you probably didn’t manage to read this far before something crawled out of your bed, asked you your name, and demanded you mix it a strawberry Nesquik.